For the past five years, in the first week of December, I log into my email account and find an email from myself, written exactly one year earlier (thanks to the online application FutureMe.org). This year was no different. On December 3, 2013, I was delighted to find a several paragraphs-long email that I had written in 2012, detailing my day to day life (I was working full-time with the King County Department of Community and Human Services) and making speculations as to what the future may hold. At the time, I was toying with the idea of graduate school at the University of Washington, but get this, towards the end of the letter I wrote "I MISS MEXICO. Lord, when will you take me abroad again?" God must have been laughing to himself when I wrote this, knowing full well that a year later I'd be three and a half months into working as the Volunteer Coordinator with Casa de los Angeles.
I am starting to 'get a hang' of things and reaching an equilibrium work-wise. I realized when talking to Laura, one of the Danish volunteers, that the reason I had such a deep crisis with the run of less-than-savory volunteers is that, as with most things in my life, I came into this job with some naive notions of what things were going to be like. Mainly, I assumed that because volunteers were coming to give their time to a charity, spending their own money to travel abroad, that they'd all more or less be 'decent' people. I hadn't accounted for the fact that some of them could possibly be immature, passive aggressive, neurotic, self-important or entitled. Just because these are volunteers, doesn't mean that the Volunteer House is exempt from the shitty-ness inherent in humanity as a whole. This isn't a utopian haven of only generous-hearted saints.
So I'm learning to embrace the ambiguity and lack of resolution in the fact that the Volunteer House will at any one time contain exemplary volunteers (conscientious, kind, go above and beyond), odd volunteers (enigmatic, tough to figure out), rude volunteers (openly selfish, prickly, uncooperative, complaining)--it's basically going to be a macrocosm of the world, morally/character-wise. So for me now, my only hope and expectation is to at any one time have just one, at least one, decent volunteer that will remind me that yes, there are actually altruistic people there... that are sincerely and genuinely altruistic, not just faking it (and are actually kind of nasty deep down, ugh, just terrible).
Another thing I'm learning is that some of the volunteers just aren't going to like me. No matter how much I may try and start conversations, try and be inviting, check-in regarding their experience at the daycare, there will just be something about me that fundamentally turns them off. And I've learned to let that go. I'm done with self-doubt and bending over backwards to please people. If they want to talk poorly about me to other volunteers and be surly toward me, that's whatever, man. Not my problem. I have enough people around me that are 'in my corner,' telling me that I'm doing a good job, that I'm just not going to worry about not being 'everything to everyone.'
I think a really neat part about my work is that through it I gain friends. I was struck today how nice it is to be able to get to know long-term volunteers well enough to the point that it's apparent in our conversations that we genuinely care about each other. You know how in some relationships there's quite a bit of superficiality, in the sense that if you ask a person, 'How are you doing?' and neither the question-asker or the question-answerer care about the answer?--neither person's heart is in it and it's more of a formality, a charade, 'going through the motions.' There's such a stark difference between stilted acquaintances and when there is genuine friendship, as in both parties are actually truly interested in what the other person has to say...
At first it can be hard to meet new volunteers, go through the small talk, and try and intuit whether the volunteer could be a potential friend, or just another person that I'll live with for a few months, they'll leave, and I won't really think about them much again. However, to get to the depth of actual friendship, that's something quite special... to be able to have real conversations about personal observations, reflections, family, friends, growing up... it actually reminds me of when I'm with my cousins, and we can just talk about anything and everything, and it's just so easy! I'm so glad to have met and spent time with Andreas (Denmark), Alice (U.K.), Adi (Israel) and Laura (Denmark). A+ people, all of them.
Thankful to have the opportunity to 'connect' with such outstanding volunteers and human beings. Yes, this job is pretty great. :)
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